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Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira – Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto April 26, 2014 Rabbi Van Lanckton Temple B’nai Shalom Braintree, Massachusetts In the aftermath of World War II, a construction worker laying the foundation for a new building on the site of the destroyed Warsaw ghetto came across a container buried in the earth. Inside were manuscripts written in Hebrew characters. The manuscripts were taken to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw for analysis. At the top of the bundle of writings was a cover letter written in Yiddish. It began with the word AUFMERKZAM followed by three exclamation points. “Aufmerkzam” means “Attention.” Here is the text of that Yiddish letter: By the grace of God. I respectfully request the honored individual or institution that will find my following writings concerning the Torah readings from the years 5700, 5701 and 5702 to be so kind as to take the trouble to forward them to the land of Israel at the following address: “Rabbi Isaiah Shapira, Tel Aviv, Palestine.” Please send this letter as well. When, with God’s compassion, I and the remaining Jews will survive the war, I request that everything be returned to me or to the Warsaw rabbinate for Kalonymus. May God have mercy on us, the remnant of Israel, wherever we may be. May He spare us, grant us life, and save us in the twinkling of an eye. With thanks from the depth of my heart. Kalonymus The years 5700, 5701 and 5702 correspond to the years 1939 to 1942. The date of the letter, written under the signature, was “the evening before the second day of the week of Parashat Va-Era, 27 Tevet, 5703.” That date was Sunday evening, January 3, 1943. Fifteen days later, on January 18, 1943, after almost four months with no deportations, the Germans suddenly entered the Page 1 of 6 Warsaw ghetto intent upon a further deportation. Within hours, they killed 600 Jews and rounded up for deportation 5,000 more. The Germans expected no resistance, but preparations to resist had been going on since the previous autumn. The first instances of Jewish armed resistance in the ghetto began that day in January. The Jewish fighters had some success: the expulsion stopped after four days and Jewish resistance organizations took control of the ghetto. For the next four months, facing the mighty German army with little more than cobblestones to throw and a dwindling supply of pistols and bullets, the Jewish resisters held the Germans of. The final battle started on the eve of Passover of April 19, 1943, when a Nazi force consisting of several thousand troops entered the ghetto. After initial setbacks, the Germans systematically burned and blew up the ghetto buildings, block by block, rounding up or murdering anybody they could capture. Significant resistance ended on April 28. The Nazis then murdered on the spot, or sent to Auschwitz and Treblinka to be murdered, the 56,000 Jews then remaining in the ghetto. The Nazis had killed 13,000 Jews in the ghetto during the uprising. That was the context of the letter discovered after the war, written by someone who called himself “Kalonymus.” A truly extraordinary letter by a truly extraordinary man. The word “God” appears in his letter three times. He begins, “By the grace of God.” He refers to “God’s compassion.” And he concludes, “May God have mercy on us, the remnant of Israel, wherever we may be. May He spare us, grant us life, and save us in the twinkling of an eye.” The author of that letter and of the Torah teachings to which it refers was Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira. He was a leading figure in Twentieth-Century Hasidism in Poland. He was known as the Piaseczner Rebbe because he had been before the war the Rebbe in the town of Piaseczno, just outside Warsaw. Rabbi Shapira was among those murdered by the Nazis in the final destruction of the ghetto. Page 2 of 6 Rabbi Shapira was famous in his own time as a pedagogue, educational theorist, and founder of a yeshiva. He was also sought after for medical advice and referrals. In the Warsaw ghetto, as Polish Jewry went through its death agony, Rabbi Shapira continued to teach, to encourage, to give material and spiritual support, and finally to show how it is possible to maintain a radiant faith in the midst of profound darkness and despair. His last book, which he referred to as “Torah insights from the years of wrath 5700 to 5702,” was among the manuscripts he buried in 1943. It was eventually published in Israel under the title “Esh Kodesh,” “Fire of Holiness.” Composed during a time of utter personal crisis and communal devastation, after Rabbi Shapira had already lost most of his family, it is the last work of Hasidism written in Poland. I learned about Rabbi Shapira from one of my rabbinical school teachers, Rabbi Nehemia Polen. Rabbi Polen wrote a book, this book, about Rabbi Shapira. The title is The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Much of what I’ve said just now comes directly from that book. Rabbi Polen began work on this book for his doctoral dissertation at Boston University, completed in 1983. His major adviser on that dissertation was Elie Wiesel. Tomorrow night and Monday we observe Holocaust Remembrance Day. Yom HaShoah. I don’t like the term “Holocaust,” though. The root meaning of that word is “burnt ofering.” That association suggests that the Jews murdered by the Nazis were in some twisted way an ofering to God. A horrible idea. I prefer the Hebrew word “shoah.” That word means devastation, destruction or ruin. It derives from a Hebrew verb that means to crash into ruins, make desolate. In Israel the day we in America know as Yom HaShoah is not called Yom HaShoah. Rather, that day is called in Israel Yom HaShoah v’HaGevurah, the day of remembrance of both the Shoah and heroism. Page 3 of 6 One of those heroes certainly is Rabbi Shapira. He resisted the Germans by inspiring the Jews of the ghetto and giving them the courage also to resist. Rabbi Shapira never lost his faith in God. He urged his followers to maintain the practices of Judaism. He told them that the Germans had the power to kill them, but it was the responsibility of the Jews not to let the Germans also destroy their connection to Judaism, even up to their very last breath. The story of Rabbi Shapira and the Warsaw Ghetto leaves me with difcult questions. How did he maintain his love of God in the midst of those horrors? What caused the Germans and their collaborators, the Poles and others, to abandon all human feeling and decency, killing Jews without mercy just because they were Jews? Why did the rest of the world, with very few exceptions, maintain silence and even actively resist eforts to rescue Jews from the Nazi death machine? My answers to these profound questions must be incomplete. I struggle to understand, a struggle in which I have engaged ever since I first learned about the Shoah in 1958 when I was a Christian teenager. Here are my necessarily partial answers. Rabbi Shapira’s faith in God and love of God were ingrained in him by all that he had lived and studied before the great catastrophe. That faith and that love were sources of strength for himself and for his followers. Rabbi Polen himself describes in this book how difcult he himself found it just to contemplate for an extended time the terrible world in which Rabbi Shapira was forced to live and work. As Rabbi Polen says, “I must confess my unbounded admiration for Rabbi Shapira’s achievements. If I found it difcult to confront this topic at a remove of almost fifty years, what inner strength did it take for Rabbi Shapira to maintain a stable center and communicate a luminous vision of faith, while in the heart of darkness itself?” I have also tried to understand why the Germans and their allies maintained their campaign of murdering Jews, and why most of the rest of the world stood by without helping or even blocked rescue attempts. The most central reason I have found is Christian Page 4 of 6 anti-Semitism dating from the earliest centuries of the Christian myth that the Jews murdered Jesus Christ. That myth led to millennia of hatred and persecution of Jews and prepared the way for Hitler’s message to resonate with his listeners. When he blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War One, and when he attributed the poor economy of Germany to Jewish greed and deceit and his claim of an international Jewish financial conspiracy, his audiences were already well prepared to receive and applaud his message. The best analysis of this terrible history is James Carroll’s book, Constantine’s Sword. Carroll traces the history of Christian violence against Jews all the way back to Emperor Constantine’s transformation of the cross of the crucifixion from a purely religious symbol into a military symbol to be carried into battle against the enemies of Christianity. Those enemies included the Muslims who had occupied Jerusalem beginning just a few years after the death of Mohammed. But the perceived enemies of Christianity soon included all Jews everywhere. Jews were the first victims of the Eleventh Century crusades. Forever after and throughout Europe, Jews were repeatedly the victims of inquisitions and pogroms motivated and led by leaders of the Christian church.

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